Artificial leaf turns sunlight into fuel

Published on: 12 Oct 2017

A Harvard team has developed an artificial leaf that converts sunlight into hydrogen and oxygen. When placed in water bionic leaf 2.0 mimics the process by which natural leaves photosynthesise, and in fact does it better!

The bionic leaf has an efficiency level of 10%, whereas the most efficient photosynthetic plants only manages to convert sunlight into biomass at a rate of around 1%. The bionic leaf 2.0 is also self-healing, easy to use and doesn’t take up a lot of space – making it a very efficient clean energy source.

The technology holds much promise for developing the world’s estimated 1.2 billion people who do not have access to an electricity supply.